The Explanatory Visualization Framework: an active learning framework for teaching creative computing using explanatory visualizations

Visualizations are nowadays appearing in popular media and are used everyday in the workplace. This democratisation of visualization challenges educators to develop effective learning strategies, in order to train the next generation of creative visualization specialists. There is high demand for skilled individuals who can analyse a problem, consider alternative designs, develop new visualizations, and be creative and innovative. Our three-stage framework, leads the learner through a series of tasks, each designed to develop different skills necessary for coming up with creative, innovative, effective, and purposeful visualizations. For that, we get the learners to create an explanatory visualization of an algorithm of their choice. By making an algorithm choice, and by following an active-learning and project-based strategy, the learners take ownership of a particular visualization challenge. They become enthusiastic to develop good results and learn different creative skills on their learning journey

Explanatory Journeys: Visualising to Understand and Explain Administrative Justice Paths of Redress

Administrative justice concerns the relationships between individuals and the state. It includes redress and complaints on decisions of a child's education, social care, licensing, planning, environment, housing and homelessness. However, if someone has a complaint or an issue, it is challenging for people to understand different possible redress paths and explore what path is suitable for their situation. Explanatory visualisation has the potential to display these paths of redress in a clear way, such that people can see, understand and explore their options. The visualisation challenge is further complicated because information is spread across many documents, laws, guidance and policies and requires judicial interpretation. Consequently, there is not a single database of paths of redress. In this work we present how we have co-designed a system to visualise administrative justice paths of redress. Simultaneously, we classify, collate and organise the underpinning data, from expert workshops, heuristic evaluation and expert critical reflection. We make four contributions: (i) an application design study of the explanatory visualisation tool (Artemus), (ii) coordinated and co-design approach to aggregating the data, (iii) two in-depth case studies in housing and education demonstrating explanatory paths of redress in administrative law, and (iv) reflections on the expert co-design process and expert data gathering and explanatory visualisation for administrative justice and law.Comment: 11 pages with 10 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphic

Visualization of time-dependent foam simulation data.

Research in the field of complex fluids such as polymer solutions, particulate suspensions and foams studies how the flow of fluids with different material parameters changes as a result of various constraints. Surface Evolver, the standard solver software used to generate foam simulations, provides large, complex, time-dependent data sets with hundreds or thousands of individual bubbles and thousands of time steps. However this software has limited visualization capabilities, and no foam specific visualization software exists. We describe the foam research application area where, we believe, visualization has an important role to play. We present a novel application, called Foam Vis, that provides various techniques for visualization, exploration and analysis of foam simulation data. Foam Vis can visualize individual time steps or produce time-dependent visualizations. It can process a simulation or it can facilitate comparison of several related simulations. We show new features in foam simulation data and new insights into foam behavior discovered using our application. Based on the many research questions that domain experts are able to address, we believe we provide a valuable tool for visualization and analysis of data in the foam research community